Joe Bendel

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Covering the recently completed Tribeca Film Festival is like a marathon sprint, with screenings all day and pieces to crank out well into the night (if you’re doing it right). Except for the final day of award winning screenings, very

It is one of the most troubling theological questions imaginable: is God’s love so all-encompassing even a monster like Hitler can find forgiveness? While theoretical to us, the issue takes on momentous urgency for two delusional homeless men who believe

Pity the poor American consumer. Evidently, a little charm and a winning smile are enough to sell them anything. They voted for Obama after all, although this film probably does not have that example in mind. It is those nefarious

Finally, global warming gets the kind of attention it deserves: public mockery. Even West Village audiences have to laugh when nature attacks in James Nguyen’s grade-Z environmental “thriller,“ though he seems to have produced it in painful earnest. Forget “so

Through a strange confluence of business and aesthetic judgments, Magnolia Pictures acquired both the best and worst films of last year’s Tribeca Film Festival. This is the week to accentuate the positive, because Conor McPherson’s haunting The Eclipse now returns

Consider them the flowers of evil. Kimilsungia and Kimjongilia are hybrid flowers crossbred to commemorate the North Korean dictators. Evidently, personality cults have to get a little creative when they have already built imposing statuary in every public square. Despite

Here in New York, the taxes are excessive, rent is exorbitant, and our elected leaders are national laughing stocks, but if you love going to the movies, it is one of the best places to live. We are usually the

A film that won the NAACP’s Image Award for Outstanding Foreign Motion Picture and was the toast of the right-leaning blogosphere (including your very own Big Hollywood) would sound like it must have reached the broadest-based audience a film could